Thursday, October 21, 2010

Paul Grossman

Paul Grossman has been a freelance journalist for many years with published articles in major magazines such as Vanity Fair and Details. He had a highly successful Actor’s Equity reading of his first stage play, The Pariah, at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan—a drama about Hannah Arendt and the Adolf Eichmann war-crimes trial, which is currently in the hands of the Perry Street Theater Company for production development. Grossman is also a long time teacher of writing and literature at Hunter College.

I’m just finishing a very powerful Dutch novel from the Second World War called Comedy in a Minor Key. Although written by a German Jew who spent those years in hiding, it’s told from the point of view of the Dutch couple who keep such a man in their care. The result is most intimate, psychologically raw exploration I’ve ever encountered of what it must have felt like to have a Jewish refugee hidden in your home at the height of the Nazi Holocaust.